One week ago a familiar phenomenon burst onto the consciousness of – we hope – millions of people in North America. Unspeakable violence, of the type that shakes us up like an earthquake shakes a mountain and spew us out like lava rocks, disrupted the lives of innocent people. Suffering gives us insight into and reason to hope for release and comfort. Things whispered in the dark have come to light. Hate and bigotry are out in the open. The murder of 11 Jewish congregants and the wounding of many others while they devoted themselves to their spiritual calling reminds us.
All of the people in the world who see themselves as having an interest in a civic society know what they need to do. It is either apathy or get a new attitude. Loving our neighbour cannot be legislated. We have learned that the moronic violence of armed guards in places of worship that the US president thinks would have saved lives has already is neither new attitude nor apathy.
We must remember this hateful act against the believing community and hold our conviction that we will not waste our heart resources on patriotism, nationalism, bigotry, xenophobia, and violence.
Our gratitude to God for the Tree of Life congregants continues. The dignity of divinity has shone through survivors. They and the fallen loved ones had already made their mark on American conscious with their pursuit of neighbourly love. The memory of Pittsburgh is unequivocal: the Tree of Live congregants are by every standard people people every community needs. Love and participation in society still speaks loudly.
When the Jewish people suffer because of who they are we all suffer. When the African family suffers – even insults by government officials – we all suffer. The family of believers (all people who trust and pursue the Supreme Being) know that the sacredness of a riverside worship needs no more armed protection than Israel needed when she departed Egypt or when the walls of Jericho fell without “a shot being fired”.  We need to be protected from our forgetful selves.  How we get past the profanation this violence represents is critical.
I pray that the One who led my parents to introduce me to the literature that Tree of Life members hold as most precious will help us to go to my places of worship with a fresh awareness of our vulnerability. People who have the highest ideals in their hearts will be the target of the malevolent spirit that has deceived and oppressed the poor.

Let us be very sure in this life of God’s regard for the living and the dead and his plan to do His good and generous pleasure. May we be ready to embrace the gifts, the fresh and the familiar, from his treasures.

In sacred memory of the Tree of Life Synagogue
8:08 AM 2018-11-03

Some talk about faith is pure games. Christ is not a problem as long as he follows Moses. In fact people expect God to deny himself so that their ways can be treated as the best thing since the walls of Jericho fell. Our prayers are mostly selfish wishes -what else could they be? – if they are not about getting our neighbours to be like us and enjoy the same things we do..

When we talk about faith we sometimes drill the propaganda that has been there all along:

1. what God wants us to do
2. How we fix our failures
3. What is our destiny

New ground

Faith in God stretches our neat packages of maxims, fables, and commands, so that a child can see the difference. Believing in God is expected to break new ground and affect those things we are incapable of changing. Ending the terror of death would be a nice starting point. God invests in giving our diseased minds one shot on this account.

One sign to believe

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you. But he answered them, An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. Matthew 12:38-41

So the next time faith comes up in a discussion comparing faiths it is good to remember that Christian faith is a matter of life and death and calls for imagination. The rulers of the earth have imagined a vain thing. They want to have a kingdom without a king. They want peace based on tough rules. Show me a child who has become a model citizen who was shaped by us-them policy, law and order and pretense and I will show you a lost cause. I will show you a laughing matter.

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us. He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Psalm 2:1-4

I mourn with the Jewish people. I will be silent remembering the murder of innocents in Pittsburgh. I stretch my hands to our Common Help.

We died in our places of worship and we are still hearing the lies of a cowardly nation’s pride in bigotry.

We died in our places of worship and the words of the heartless hold little comfort in the face of this evil.

O that my head were a fountain to feed my eyes in sympathy and grief.

Translations can help communicators as well as muck things up. People with large audiences who post verses need to show the proper care.

Every place where we think we see some action we turn it into a command. We love being told what to do so we turn up every rock hoping to say we have applied the message.

1 Peter 5:7 does not tell us to
“cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you”.

Peter’s command is humble yourselves.

Casting all our anxieties… is the context in which we need to stay humble.

1 Peter 5:7 gets posted as a verse (which it is!) when in effect it is a mother isolated from its baby. In context

1 Peter 5:6-7
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting (having thrown once for all) all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

We can see how easily people fall for glitter. The apostle calls for continued humility in accordance with the fact that we have already thrown all our anxieties on the Saviour.

The throwing actiion is easily illustrated because the word for throw/cast appears in one other place: the Lord’s donkey ride into Zion.

ERRIPTO – I throw on

To be sure, verses seem necessary, but verses are not always complete thoughts. Verse by verse comments amount to little understanding if one ignores the clear sentence breaks in the Holy Books.

I hope this verse had not tripped you up into a thinking a commandment-keeping response was in order. If it had that is a concern you can happily lay on the Saviour